Affiliated with the Bauhaus during its heyday, Mantz photographed functionalist architecture such as houses, factories, bridge constructions, and motorways. The pictures are extremely detailed, and with their bold cropping and angles they profit from the architecture's geometric and modernist idiom. While clearly an outgrowth of the Neu Sachlichkeit movement in German art, Mantz is also an important predecessor of such artists as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, and Stephen Shore.